Women, Land Rights and SDGs

Securing women’s land rights does more than just make them more prosperous. It’s also linked
to the greater well-being of their families, especially their children. Recent studies show, for
example, that women tend to invest more of their earnings than men into the well-being of
their families, especially in areas such as child health, nutrition and education.
Investing in women’s equal access to land and assets, then, is a direct investment in our future
– as well as a crucial step towards both achieving gender equality (SDG 5) and ending hunger
(SDG 2). The former goal, in particular, is fundamental to accelerating progress across the
entirety of the 2030 Agenda.

Chapter Fifteen is working to secure land rights for women. Progress has been made in securing
women’s land rights through titling and we are working to address the challenges women face
through a more robust range of interventions to ensure that they can make decisions on land
use and reap benefit from the land. Our interventions include ensuring more gender-equitable
laws as well as training and capacity-building for women.
Chapter Fifteen fully recognizes the need to secure women’s land rights. The Sustainable
Development Goals, the world’s blueprint for development, include women’s land ownership
and secure tenure rights as indicators for poverty eradication (Goal 1), ending hunger (Goal 2),
and gender equality (Goal 5). The first international land governance standards and principles
agreed upon by states, the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of
Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security, call upon states to “ensure
that women and girls have equal tenure rights and access to land, fisheries and forests
independent of their civil and marital status.” Regionally, the African Union, for example, has
declared a goal of 30 percent of all registered land being in a woman’s name by 2025.

Chapter Fifteen is working to ensure that policies and interventions on land titling and land
registration in Uganda increasingly mandate or promote joint titling of household land in the
names of both spouses or registration in the name of women individually.
At Chapter Fifteen, we will continue working towards these goals, in collaboration with our
local and development partners and we call upon all public and private stakeholders for their
support in this endeavor.